Bus error: Jake Billo’s weblog

Peter Westwood, a WordPress developer, recently announced a planned change that will disable Atom and XML-RPC publishing by default. I’m thrilled at this direction: many of my corporate and professional installations of WordPress require significant tweaking to disable remote publishing.

In the meantime, I’ve actually had no ill effects from removing xmlrpc.php from the default WordPress installation.

Another tweak I usually employ is applying a .htaccess file to the wp-admin directory. Using a set of Allow/Deny directives, you can restrict access to your administration panel to local machines only. For example, creating a new file /wp-admin/.htaccess:

Order allow,deny
Allow from 192.168.1
Deny from all

This example file ensures that only users coming from 192.168.1.x addresses can access the administration dashboard. It’s very useful because regardless of password compromise, only internal users will ever be able to access the login prompt.

Another solution that would still allow remote access by trusted users would include a dual-layered authentication system. Using the htpasswd utility and the .htaccess tutorial from Apache, create a separate login to access the administration panel. This prompt will appear before the default WordPress login. Roaming web spiders and malicious bots will have a more difficult time accessing the wp-admin directory with appropriate access restrictions in place.

In an effort to be regular with my content - considering this week has not been kind to my posting schedule - I’ll continue with “Random Links of Interest Friday”. Here’s what I’ve stumbled across this week:

• A List Apart: Sliding Doors CSS. This article provides examples of how to implement rounded tabs by styling an unordered list element.
• CBC News: Digg dumps Google for Microsoft as ad partner. Facebook already has had the Microsoft contract for a while now, and I’m fairly certain Microsoft’s ad business is operated outside of the MSN/Windows Live norms.
• ColorSchemer Online. I’ve been doing a few web designs this week and sites like this one have been immensely helpful in selecting complimentary colours for links, active elements, etc…
• O2Networks Blog: A friend of mine, Dave Aldwinckle, has joined the weasel community of people who write things nobody else wants to hear online. He’s already got some great content online, such as this uTorrent technical manual for new users to the world of BitTorrent. (Disclaimer: EdgeLink Consulting indirectly hosts and helps with the IT dirty work for Dave’s site.
• Wall Street Journal: Hide the Button: Steve Jobs Has His Finger on It. A discussion of everyone’s favourite CEO and his hatred for buttons in user interfaces.
• McAfee Site Advisor Phishing Quiz. See if you can spot the scam sites from the real ones. Most of the problems, though, stem from incredibly poor English. If any of these scammers paid a technical writer to proofread their content, it would start getting really challenging to separate the real from the imitation sites.
• ScoreHero gets new Guitar Hero III information. While I’m probably not picking up this game (waiting for Rock Band personally), it’s neat to hear about the improvements coming in the next version of the game. The forum thread is full of fanboys, though - as would be expected if your favourite game developer paid for a trip to you to see their next product.
• The Math Moron. A Slate columnist, frustrated with her own mathematical ineptitude, decides to enroll in Kumon to be better able to help her daughter with homework. Also check out her latest piece about being a standardized patient and the following chat transcript.
• RewriteRule examples for Apache. While the actual rules themselves are regular expressions (regex), the formatting of them can be slightly different. This site has a few good examples for your webserver configuration.
• TOBlog: Your Rights as a Photographer in Toronto. A former coworker of mine wrote this post about what you’re legally allowed to do when taking pictures. Good advice for anyone who’s gotten a digital camera and is starting out into photography.